Five reasons why music festivals aren’t worth the hype

Festival season is on its way, and while your social feeds are bound to be buzzing with summer vibes, festivals are totally overrated. We’re so not ready for the same Snapchat stories we see every year, where a bunch of drunk people dance to deafening music, dressed in whatever counts as #festivalready this time around.

Ugh, the hate is real – here’s why.

The dreaded underage music festival

Underage punters are the worst. They’re loud, pushy and try way too hard to convince themselves that they’re having a totally baller time.

When you enter any all-ages festival, you’ll pass underage kids sculling cruisers, stupidly close to the entry where the cops are stationed. But somehow, they’ll manage to sneak in totally wasted. And that déjà vu will be real when they annex your front-row spot at your fave band’s set. They’ll pretend they’re truly “sorry”, while they steal the ground from under you. That very spot that you sacrificed 30 minutes to save instead of going to the bathroom or lining up to buy nachos. Typical.

Festival noobs

They’re usually found scaling the scaffolding to lunge a VB can at the bass player’s head. Or they’re the one screaming for the next act to come on while your faves are on stage.

They’re also the person who decides to tear off every inch of toilet paper and throw it on the wet floor of the port-a-loo. But it’s more likely they’re the one elbowing people in the back and trying to start a death pit while some geeky British indie band plays.

Food is hella expensive

The most vanilla foods cost a fortune. How can cheese and chips disguising themselves as nachos cost $10? And the saddest thing is, after a few hours you realise that you’re couped up like a caged chicken and you’ll have to settle for the mediocre grub because you can’t take the hunger anymore.

That means lining up for someone to pass you something that looks suspiciously pre-prepared while you miss another cool band onstage. And don’t get us started on the portion size – it’s one that only fine diners can get away with serving.

The lonely-drifter sitch

Chances are, if you and your mates like different music, you’re doomed to spend the festival alone. Because festival organisers want to ruin our lives, they often put the best two acts on, forcing punters to decide on who to see. This means there’ll be some hectic negotiation between your squad that will most likely fall through once you get there.

Then you’ll be left to meet up after the show, with both parties forgetting where the meetup spot is. Queue the flashbacks of being abandoned in the supermarket by your ‘rents when you were little.

Those people who need drugs to have a good time

Since the dawn of Woodstock there’s been ‘fakers’, who have no idea who’s playing but take festivals as their queue to get majorly smashed. They often make festivals feel like a pretty scary place, especially when it gets dark and they’re on an agro mission to reach the stage.

If you can’t enjoy the festival without drugs or copious amounts of alcohol, and plan to get wasted to the point of being aggressive, you’re the reason that so many of us have sworn off festivals for good.

Yeah, festivals look glamorous from the outset, but they’re really not worth the hype. Unlike staying in bed and powering through countless cups of coffee to watch Jessica Jones. That’s a killer night to be had.

Eden Gillespie

Eden Gillespie is an International Studies/ Media student at UNSW with a love for breakfast bagels and Louis Theroux.